Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA	ScD	05/2013	Social & Psychiatric Epidemiology
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA	Postdoctoral Fellowship	05/2015	Infectious Disease Epidemiology

Professional and Published Name: Sari L. Reisner, ScD

Pronouns: He, Him

Dr. Sari L. Reisner, ScD, MA (he/him) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. He is a core faculty member in the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health (CSEPH) at the University of Michigan, and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Trained as a social and psychiatrist epidemiologist, Dr. Reisner’s research focuses on understanding and mitigating health inequities for underserved populations, particularly in mental health and substance use, HIV infection, and healthcare access and quality outcomes. Dr. Reisner brings deep expertise in LGBTQ+ health and transgender and gender diverse population health, social determinants of health, sex- and gender-based research methods, and community-engaged research practices. His work utilizes a “participatory population perspective” (Reisner et al., Lancet, 2016) to work “with” not “on” communities to promote health equity. He is an Affiliated Research Scientist and Director of Transgender Health Research at The Fenway Institute at Fenway Health advancing health equity research through academic-community partnerships.

Dr. Reisner is/has been PI of multiple research investigations funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), and others in domestic and global contexts. He has co-authored more than 300 peer-reviewed publications and led a chapter in the WPATH Standards of Care Version 8, the guidelines for healthcare of transgender people globally. Dr. Reisner was appointed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) as a Committee Member to conduct a national consensus study on the health of sexual and gender minorities which was published in 2020. In 2022, he became an elected Board Member for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). He is a founding Associate Research Editor of the PubMed-indexed journal Transgender Health.

Dr. Reisner completed two years of post-doctoral training in infectious disease epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. School of Public Health. He earned a Doctorate of Science from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and holds a Master of Arts from Brandeis University and a Bachelor of Arts from Georgetown University.